like fire and fiddles take wood and make it speak. I know, I know—water isn’t wine.

But at night, when someone’s thirsty, you can bring it, cold as heaven. They can drink.

[in Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011)]

She’s a Pisces; No Wonder I’m Capsized

No wonder I’m out here doing the backstroke, floating on this soft black water from reflected star to star.

No wonder I’ve half-forgotten how to spell boat or shore or Coast Guard. No wonder my heart feels splashy now instead of smart.

A Capricorn would want a surer plan. An Aries might meet me in the door, saying “How come you’re late? And why are you . . .

what the hell?—what is this, salt?” No, she’s definitely Pisces not Gemini; Gemini girls will be skinny dipping one day,

toweling off and off beyond the dunes the next. She’s definitely Pisces, and I’m long, long gone from any lighthouse,

and I can’t say I’m much of a fisherman. But I think I can learn to sink, then a better way to swim.

[in Weather Report (Somondoco Press, 2006)]

Gathering Pages for The Book of Sharks

“What do you do for a living?” is a complicated question since for a living and for money aren’t the same.

Living means a shoreline is better than a bank vault— all those deposits of driftwood—

and wealth is measured by the vivid moments in your life.

Money’s just currency, though it wants to sell you your future.

It has no past, no story explaining the sky, comparing the stars to a shark bite.

It’s plastic littering the sand dunes; it isn’t the grass.

Let’s say I’m a gatherer in the same way clouds are gatherers,

which isn’t a ticket to riches unless you value rain.

•

Some say sharks are the ocean’s anger at us for being in its future.

They say it knew riptides and hurricanes wouldn’t be enough,

that it would take teeth to teach us, to move us from selfishness to awe.

Most who hold to this story are quiet, but they mark the days of past attacks:

a splash of whiskey in their coffee while they listen to the waves,

listen to the wind chimes they’ve polished, then scrub the weather from their porches,

paint their doors. These chores are their rituals,

performed so you wouldn’t even know. After all, red doors seem common enough . . .

more like keeping up appearances than keeping track.

•

Others focus on a different idea and spend each April fasting.

That’s when coastal waters come alive with food, nine miles of sardines

and every predator: swordfish stabbing up from underneath, and birds

harpooning from above . . . sea lions, dolphins,

horizons of shark fins. All. They wait until sundown,

then parade from door to door, trading music for oysters, a gallon of last year’s wine,

and nobody thinks about winter, nobody thinks about dying.

Only a few of them, the oldest, hunger for their boats.

•

In the oldest story we know of, sharks came first: the perfect idea, perfect shape.

And then the rest of Creation—the sun, the moon, this planet—to give them a home.

We live on that afterthought, build boats to crisscross the water,

build churches like islands surrounded by our cars.

We kill sharks by the millions and sing along from our hymnals.

In the end, standing at the gates of heaven, what if we’re asked one question: “How are My sharks?”

•

The best understanding I’ve heard was offered by a boy. His father had died of a fever the summer before.

He said, “People think dying is for every kind of animal but us.

Like it’s so unfair we aren’t special.” I was just a boy then too.

We’d been trying to climb down the cliff face, and now we were stuck halfway

with eleven hours ’til light. . . . He looked past his feet

at the water below us, maybe to add up the distance.

He said, “My dad would have had the guts to jump from here. He’d have been on the beach already, building us a fire.”

•

Given their name, it should be obvious what salmon sharks eat.

Still, you never expect it: first a tug and a sockeye’s resistance,

then a yank like the day is having a heart attack.

Just seconds. Only ’til the line snaps and a gray fin breaks the surface. . . .

The sky isn’t the only home of lightning. The ocean has some too.

•

I’m a gatherer of what’s been gathered: not like the beach,

more like a kid with a bucket; not a net,

more a stall at the market, selling fish . . . or the scale, or the news-wrap.

As purposes go, it’s not a bad purpose to have.

You can be the man buying coho for dinner, or the woman carrying flowers home for a vase.

I’ll be the shelf the vase sits on. I’ll be the tap on the faucet filling it up.

Not the ocean, just an ear that listens.

Not the shark, just a gatherer of memories swimming away.

Rob Carney grew up in Washington state. He is the author of three books and three chapbooks of poems, most recently Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011) and Home Appraisals (Plan B Press, 2012). He is the winner of the 2014 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Prize and the 2013 Terrain.org Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, Mid-American Review, Redactions, Sugar House Review, and dozens of other journals, as well as in the anthology Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City.

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Jessy Randall

I love these! Rob Carney should be quoted more frequently. A couple of years ago, he and Scott Poole and I wrote up a sort of manifesto in the form of an invoice (I forget why this made sense to us at the time). Here it is:

21 Recommended Poetry Repairs by Firepoem Tires

Repair / Price
1. It’s okay to be funny. $5.00
2. It’s okay to write about every day, mundane things and feelings. Actually we like that. $7.99
3. Consider having a job besides poetry. Then you won’t be mad when poetry doesn’t make you any money. $11.02
4. Notice words. $10.00
5. Think words are good. $9.99
6. Avoid certain overly-amazing words like obsidian, etc. $50.22
7. Don’t be only funny. $4.00
8. Talk to poets you like and tell them you like them. Encourage them. Try to keep liking them. $1.25
Total invoice: $99.47 $99.47

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